1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing system operations and, in particular, relates to the automated analysis of and response to computer generated messages. More particularly, the present invention employs inference rules and artificial intelligence techniques to determine message content and appropriate response.
2. Background and Prior Art
Large computer systems generate messages to the computer operators informing them of computer operations status, error messages, and requests for operator action. Historically these messages have been displayed on a computer operator console for action by the operator. As computer systems have become more complex and capable of higher transaction rates, the number of messages generated to the operator has greatly increased. In addition, business interest in increasing the productivity of computer operators has resulted in the introduction of automated tools to assist the operators. Effective automated computer operations requires that the message stream generated by the computer system be analyzed and, if possible, an automated response be generated and sent to the computer system.
The analysis of and response to messages is complicated by the fact that many of the messages are produced by operating systems and programs that do not anticipate the use of automated operations tools. Thus, many messages are not well structured and may be difficult to reliably analyze. In addition, messages may consist of many parts that are not received sequentially. For example, a multiline message may begin transmission to the operator only to be interrupted by a higher priority message indicating an error or the need for operator action. While a human operator can typically deal with the non-sequential receipt of message lines, existing automated operations program have not been able to do so.
The diversity of message formats has typically required detailed message specification tables for automated operations. This has required considerable programming effort and, in some cases, has limited the capabilities of automated operation systems. In addition, the generation of detailed message tables frequently limits the application of the automated system to a single computer for which the tables were generated. Tailoring tables based upon system or operator parameters typically is not feasible. Finally, most existing automated operation systems perform sequential searches through the message tables to locate any applicable messages. This results in poor performance in any system with large message tables.
Thus, the technical problem to be solved is the creation of an automated operations system that can accept interleaved messages from a variety of systems, and be able to analyze and appropriately respond or manage the messages in an efficient manner.